A Quote by Noam Chomsky

Why did the people think [Vietnam war] was fundamentally wrong and immoral? The guys who ran the polls, John E. Rielly, a professor at the University of Chicago, a liberal professor, he said what that means is that people thought too many Americans had being killed. Another possibility is they didn't like the fact that we were carrying out the worst crime since the Second World War. But that's so inconceivable that wasn't even offered as a possible reason.
If you look back to the anti-intervention movements, what were they? Let's take the Vietnam War - the biggest crime since the Second World War. You couldn't be opposed to the war for years. The mainstream liberal intellectuals were enthusiastically in support of the war. In Boston, a liberal city where I was, we literally couldn't have a public demonstration without it being violently broken up, with the liberal press applauding, until late 1966.
Take a look at public opinion. About 70 percent of the population, in the polls, said the [Vietnam ] war was fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake. And that attitude lasted as long as polls were taken in the early '80s.
The reason why many young people in the Vietnam War era were active was their lives were threatened by the draft and they were going to perhaps be forced to go overseas and fight in an immoral war.
When I was arrested opposing the war in Vietnam in 1965, as I said about 20 or 30% of people were opposed to the war. By 1968, more than half of Americans were opposed to the war. If you pull in Europeans, Canadians, people from around the Third World, the war was vastly unpopular. But even half of Americans by 1968 opposed the war.
As professor of global peace studies at the International Islamic University of Malaysia I am committed to the ending of war also through criminalization of war, an approach that has not been sufficiently used in spite of the UN Charter outlawing war - with too many loopholes used buy aggressive countries.
When I was doing Professor Albert Einstein's bust he had many a jibe at the Nazi professors, one hundred of whom had condemned his theory of relativity in a book. 'Were I wrong,' he said, 'one professor would have been enough.
I'm a very happy university professor... the best thing about being a university professor is that you see young people as they're being shaped and molded toward their own future, and you have a chance to be a part of that.
I was a mere 29-year-old instructor at Kyoto, enjoying daily research work with some young students. Nothing had prepared me to be a professor at a major national university. Being too young and inexperienced to be a Full Professor, I was first appointed Associate Professor of Chemistry.
Take the Iraq War,it's the second worst crime after the Second World War. It's the first time in history, in the history of imperialism, there were huge demonstrations, before the war was officially launched.
During World War II, Joseph Stalin was once asked by an American writer, according to Professor Dean Russell, how he could justify conscripting all the property of all the people for use by the government to fight the war. Stalin answered by asking why they considered it more immoral and illogical to conscript lifeless property than to conscript life itself, as was being done in the United States and all other capitalistic countries. His American challenger had no answer, because there was no answer.
We are confronted with the possibility of a war of such destruction that the whole existence of our nation and of the whole world is at stake. And yet, people know it - people read it in the newspapers, people read that at the first attack, a hundred million Americans might be killed. And yet, they talk about it as if they were talking about something being wrong with the carburetor of their car, perhaps.
I thought in 1965 that my job was to convince most Americans to be against the war. So I spent summers knocking on doors, handing out literature, trying to talk to people who didn't agree with me, trying to get them to see the war was wrong. And by 1968 a majority of Americans did oppose the war.
Though the Americans can be fooled, as they have been, and they can be propagandized, as they have been... But, as Lincoln said, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time. But you can't fool all of the people all of the time." And so hope lies in the fact that little by little, even if the American people can be fooled, even if they continue to be fooled in the 2004 presidential election, they will gradually learn, as they have learned - for instance, in the Vietnam War and turned against the Vietnam War.
The word crap is actually another word that's very, very old. It was taken over from 17th century England by the pilgrim fathers and Americans were talking about things being crap in the 17th and 18th centuries. What Sir Thomas Crapper โ€“ complete coincidence โ€“ does is not invent the flushing toilet, as many, many people believe, but was a great promoter for it. He ran a business marketing other people's products and that's why his name was on them. When the American soldiers came over in the First World War, they all thought it was hilarious that it said 'crapper' on them.
Vietnam was the first time that Americans of different races had to depend on each other. In the Second World War, they were segregated; it was in Vietnam that American integration happened in the military - and it wasn't easy.
Once the war began, the government could do anything 'necessary' to win it; so it was with the 'final solution of the Jewish problem,' which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its 'necessities' gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany's losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it.
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